About 30 years ago, I flew to Malaysia for the first time. During the flight, I noticed something interesting.

Before making an announcement, the flight attendant would say:

“Tuan-tuan dan puan-puan.”

I did not speak Malay, but it did not take me long to figure out that this meant “Ladies and gentlemen.”

Later, while traveling around Malaysia, I began comparing signs written in Malay and English. I soon noticed an interesting pattern. Words were sometimes repeated:

buku → buku-buku
book → books

rumah → rumah-rumah
house → houses

anak → anak-anak
child → children

orang → orang-orang
person → people

I was delighted. I had never seen a language make plurals this way before.

Tuan-tuan dan Puan-puan

There was one small detail I learned later.

Tuan means “sir” or “gentleman,” while puan means “madam” or “lady.”

So:

tuan-tuan = gentlemen
puan-puan = ladies

And:

Tuan-tuan dan puan-puan = “Ladies and gentlemen.”

The process of repeating a word like this is called reduplication. In Malay, it is called kata ganda, which basically means a “doubled word.”

Is a Malay Noun Singular or Plural?

Actually, the system is a little more complicated than simply saying that doubling makes a plural.

Malay nouns are usually number-neutral. In other words, buku can mean either “book” or “books.” The meaning often comes from the context.

If you want to make it clear that there is more than one, however, you can repeat the word:

buku → buku-buku

kucing → kucing-kucing
cat → cats

kereta → kereta-kereta
car → cars

But you do not usually need to repeat the noun when the number is already clear.

For example:

tiga buku = three books

You would not normally say tiga buku-buku because tiga (“three”) already tells us that there is more than one book.

What About Indonesian?

I had thought that Indonesian did not use this system. Interestingly, it does.

Malay and Indonesian are closely related languages, and Indonesian also uses reduplication:

buku-buku = books
rumah-rumah = houses
anak-anak = children
orang-orang = people

So this interesting feature is found in both languages.

Other Languages Do It Too

Once I started looking into this, I discovered that Malay is far from alone.

Reduplication is especially common among Austronesian languages, the huge family of languages spoken from Southeast Asia across the Pacific.

Javanese, for example, also uses reduplication:

omah → omah-omah
house → houses

bocah → bocah-bocah
child → children

Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines, uses reduplication too. Its system is more complicated, however. Sometimes only partof a word is repeated. Reduplication can also show repeated actions, intensity and other meanings.

Hawaiian, Māori, Samoan and other Polynesian languages also use different kinds of reduplication.